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UNDER THE LEADERSHIP of U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and “energy czar” Carol Browner, the Obama administration continues to develop an unprecedented amount of new draconian environmental regulations that will severely damage America’s beleaguered industrial sector. The scope of these initiatives is breathtaking, going well beyond anything that has ever been attempted in the name of ecological purity in America. While many of us share a sense of foreboding about what the EPA has been doing, few really understand the issues. After all, cap and trade is dead, is it not? With that job-killing, economically disastrous idea out of the way, most people seem to believe that the EPA’s ability to interfere with the free market in general and with industry in particular will remain pretty much the same as ever: an expensive annoyance to be sure, but a manageable annoyance nonetheless.
Unfortunately, the hard reality of the situation today is very different and far from encouraging. Cap and trade may be dead, but that doesn’t mean that the EPA and other governmental entities aren’t pursuing other ways to sabotage America’s ability to use cheap, abundant fossil fuels in order to generate power, which is a vital component of fueling economic recovery. The fact is that the Obama administration and its liberal allies are conducting a full-scale assault on America’s energy sector, and on our industrial base, in the guise of environmental protection.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION IN AMERICA: A BRIEF HISTORY
If we are going to fairly consider where America is today with regard to protecting the environment, we must start with an evaluation of where we have been. Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon signed into law the two landmark statutes that were designed to reverse decades of environmental damage that built up in the industrialized era: the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Few people, regardless of their ideological bent, could argue against the need for either piece of legislation. People who lived in or near large urban centers could see firsthand how dirty the air was. The evidence ranged from the unnatural color of the sky to the coating of dust that would appear on automobiles parked in the city overnight. Burning rivers and dead lakes testified to the fact that numerous waterways were as dirty as the air.
The Clean Air and Clean Water acts were designed to clean up the mess we had made. At the time they were passed, environmental advocates set reasonable, achievable goals. First, the EPA set up numeric standards for pollutants in the air and water. These were the targets. For example, air would be considered “clean” only if no more than X parts per million of particulate matter and Y parts per million of carbon monoxide were detected. A similar but more complex scheme was used to define clean water, depending on how the water would be used. Having set these goals, the EPA, along with various state and local regulatory authorities, then started building the regulatory structure that would allow the nation to reach those targets. New standards forced automobile manufacturers to install pollution-control devices on vehicles; oil refineries to introduce new fuel blends; and thousands of factories and power plants to install expensive pollution-control devices.
Business owners grumbled, of course, wondering if the expense was necessary and whether the added costs would put American manufacturers at more of a competitive disadvantage relative to foreign competitors. But ultimately, everyone did what they had to do. Americans paid a little more for their automobiles, power, and a host of products, but the expense wasn’t enough to really catch anyone’s attention, much less to cause concern. Business owners learned that they had to add a new line item on the expense side of the ledger labeled “Environmental Compliance,” and while new expenses are never welcome, this one turned out to be manageable in the broad scheme of things.
The results were astounding. The amount of particulate matter (that’s dust, to you and me) and lead in the air quickly decreased almost a hundredfold. Concentration of other air pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and ozone, dropped precipitously. Fish returned to waterways that had been horribly polluted just a few years before. Lake Erie rose from the dead to become a sportsman’s paradise.
But there was another side to the amazing, and amazingly rapid, success stories called the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Meeting the requirements of both pieces of legislation required a new kind of support infrastructure, and what we have come to call “green jobs” were born. This included everything from the Sierra Club lobbyist pushing Congress to pass more legislation, to the company that makes state-of-the-art pollution-control devices, to the armies of federal, state, and local bureaucrats who make sure that everyone follows the rules. Law firms sprouted environmental departments to help companies that ran afoul of the EPA, and consultants (like me) began to earn a living by guiding businesses through the tangle of regulations that grew more confusing each year.
As is always the case, once you build up a multifaceted industry like the environmental industry, it’s extremely difficult to tear it down or even shrink it a little. This is particularly true when government alone has the power to reduce the size of an industry that – like any service industry – does nothing to create wealth but instead saps capital generated by wealth creators. Absent government mandates, the environmental industry would be a fraction of the size that it is today, for there are few free-market forces that would support such an industry.
Once you build up a multifaceted industry like the environmental industry, it’s extremely difficult to tear it down or even shrink it a little.
And thus we come to the essential conundrum that dominates the increasingly schizophrenic nature of the EPA and environmental policy in this country. On one hand, every administration is anxious to establish its environmental bona fides and trumpet its green triumphs. The agency, likewise, wants everyone to know that it is using taxpayer dollars wisely and is thoroughly protecting the environment. However, nobody is going to declare victory and go home. Nobody is going to say, “That’s clean enough, America – let’s cut back the size of the EPA and the environmental industry and just go into a maintenance mode.” Admitting that we’ve finished the job, in any facet of environmental protection, would mean that great swaths of the environmental industry would go out of business, from the big companies that produce pollution-abatement equipment to the environmental advocacy groups that provided those companies with a reason to exist. Thus, we have the Zeno’s paradox version of environmental policy in America today: We can approach the target of a green planet by halves, but we’re not allowed to actually get there.
Thus, even though the goals of the original Clean Air and Clean Water acts have long been fulfilled just about everywhere, those achievements didn’t represent an end but rather a beginning. Congress drew up legislation to address other environmental concerns. Bills were passed that aimed to clean up old, poorly managed hazardous-waste dumps (the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, also known as “Superfund”); better manage hazardous-waste generation and disposal (the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act); better manage toxic chemicals (the Toxic Substances Control Act); enhance community safety (the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act) and do a host of other good things in the name of environmental protection and to enhance our quality of life. There is little doubt that many of these measures were justified, even if the environmental activists usually employed a healthy dose of hyperbole to make manageable problems sound like we were near the end of the world as we know it.
But as more and more environmental legislation was passed, the environmental industry grew larger and larger. The EPA used the authority that Congress granted it to keep environmental goals moving, raising the bar whenever a particular goal was met. Consider ozone, for example.
While ozone is a good thing when it’s high in the atmosphere, protecting us from the harmful portion of the sun’s rays, ozone is not so welcome at the ground level, where people can